The darkest timeline
by Davinahyde
Summary: Kylo Ren and Rey have been battling one another for what seems like forever. The third member of their party keeps showing them things as they could have been. It's not going to be enough.
1. Chapter 1

The largest moon of Kirien's Planet was once a hideaway, a travel destination for young lovers. After the battle, it was nothing more than a plain of dead bodies. After a year the soil would be rich for planting, but no one was left on the moon to do the farming. No one would come back here for a very long time. The only harvest for years would be the bones and armor of the Resistance fighters and stormtroopers who fought at this, the last battle of the war. First they used with the massive weaponry of their respective groups, then with the individual guns, then hand-to-hand, like savages.

Two people were left standing in the mud made of dirt and blood. The same two people who were there at the start stood facing one another across the Paradise Fields, which in the center of the Yalla Mountain Range. Once upon time the Paradise area was generally agreed upon as the most beautiful stretch of land on the moon, with the cliff that overlooked the Lake of Yallalin and the warm breezes and the rushing waters of the waterfall. Paradise was left a charnel house.

The man, all in his usual black uniform, cape, and mask, waited at one end of the fields. The woman wore a white uniform of the Resistance troops, but the fabric has gotten so dirty and mangled her clothes resemble rags.

How many times have they done this? How many times have they fought each other using graceful movements and brutal sweeps of the arm? How many times have they fought one another's mental dominance off? How many ways has this gone?

She cleared her mind and prepared herself. She knew this time would be different, because centering herself felt almost redundant — she was already as centered as she could be. She was ready. Her mind was quiet and empty and she had no attachment to the outcome of this duel, because what will happen has already happened and the past is the future and she knew, in a way that she'd never truly understood before, that she cannot use the Force without being used by it. Using the Force made the cycle continue.

He flicked his lightsaber on. The red blade glowed, the crossguard casting a red light against his black-gloved hand. He walked toward her.

She turned her lightsaber on, and she waited.

It is not just the two of them any more. It never had been, really. The third member of their party — the Force, in all its incarnations — was there too.

This time, Rey was waiting for the third to join them as well.


	2. Chapter 2

Rey, the Leader of the Resistance, the symbol for hope and a new life in a universe without the First Order in it, visits member worlds whenever she can. The people need to see her, need to know that the Resistance — the New Republic — is alive and well and building something for everyone. The future is filled with hope and light for everyone. Rey meets with everyone she can, fixes what she can, delegates what she must. Rebuilding will take generations. But maybe, just maybe, this time the building will stick.

On Tserek, a world far removed from the main centers of the New Republic's rebuilding efforts, she takes a moment to breathe. To have a few moments for herself. General Dameron — Poe — has assured her all is well at headquarters. Finn wants her to come home, but her head is too full of the pain and fear and destruction she's been seeing to truly be present for her husband, the way he deserves. Her heart hurts. Her head hurts. Her feet hurt.

She asks the Colonel, an Azatakian woman currently governing Tserek, where she can go to fix one of those things and get her boots repaired.

The Colonel directs her to the small village near the sea.

She walks into the cobbler's station and sees him kneeling there, fitting a shoe onto a small boy. She would know that profile anywhere, with the bright, angry scar down the cheek of pale skin. That thick, black hair. The hands, so sure in their touch. The man is older now, still boyish in his appearance, even as a few strands of grey have appeared in his black hair. Even kneeling, he is so much larger than the young boy, who is five or six at most and swinging his three legs back and forth with excitement.

Rey wants to take out her lightsaber and scream, "Run! Run now!"

She says nothing.

The man turns from his kneeling position to see who is in the doorway. His only reaction is that his eyes widen slightly in recognition. Those eyes. She sees those eyes when she closes her own and they make her afraid. Rey is not mistaken. It is him. The man for years who has haunted her nightmares and her mission and her marriage.

"Please wait a moment" is all he says to her. He taps the side of the boy's foot. "Try that."

The boy hops off the chair and begins running around the shop, building up so much speed Rey wonders if he might not take flight. "These are so good!" the boy yells, punching one fist in the air.

One of the boy's mothers puts the credits on the table and thanks the young man as he unfolds himself into a standing position. He says goodbye to the family as they leave.

When they are alone, the only thing the Monster says is: "Oh."

All of the meditation practice Rey has been doing on her long interstellar travels is for naught: she wants to scream. She wants to cut him in half. She wants to destroy every last inch of the man who butchered half the known worlds in his quest for power. She understands why giving in to anger means giving in to the Dark Side.

"What are you doing here?" is the only thing she can make herself say.

"I make shoes," Kylo Ren says.

He was the only leader of the First Order not brought to justice when the war ended. General Hux signed the unconditional surrender of his entire armed forces to General Dameron and then hanged himself in his prison cell, rather than face the trial. Supreme Leader Snoke was chased down to a gaseous giant in the Medina system and he took forty-seven blaster bolts before he stopped moving. No one had any idea where the First Knight of Ren disappeared to. Several men claimed to be him, and each and every time Rey, the only person left who knew what he looked like, had to be the one to say, "No, that's not him."

And now here he was.

Healthy. Whole. Unharmed.

Damn him.

"People always need shoes," Kylo Ren says. "To everyone's surprise including my own, I'm quite good at making them."

"I bet you are," Rey says.

"How did you find me?" he asks, as though he were inquiring about the weather. When she can't bring herself to speak, he nods. "Ah. Of course. 'Coincidence.'" He smiles. He has a charming smile, damn him. "Well, not really coincidence, of course. The Force showed you the way here."

"Why are you here?" she demands.

He shrugs. "The war was lost and I didn't fancy being put on trial. Cowardice. An old story."

He moves around the back of his counter before she can yell at him to stop. He limps. He favors his right side. He reaches for something underneath the countertop and she isn't even aware of reaching for her own lightsaber before it is in her hand, on, buzzing, ready to fight him.

He pulls a shoebox out and puts in on the countertop. "You're probably looking for this," he says.

She should gut him right now, before he reaches for anything else, for the strands of the Force, for the control of her mind.

He opens the box and pushes it toward her.

She walks toward the counter, her lightsaber held at the ready.

In the box is the handle of his lightsaber. If she is not mistaken — and she's Rey, of course she's not mistaken — there is dust on the handle.

"I'm not going to fight you," Kylo says.

"What happened?" she asks.

"At the end, I ran. Afraid. Alone. When Snoke died it was like a fog cleared in my mind, but that's just an excuse. I knew what I had done. Now I see running away just delayed the inevitable." He smiles gently. "At least I have had a chance to make a small difference, in one community."

"You need to pay for what you have done."

"Rey," he says softly, "be honest. What is there I can do to make up for what I did?"

He's right, of course. Justice is a funny thing. The punishment can never fit the crime, and when she considers the scale of the crimes this monster has engaged in, she can't imagine the punishment the jury would hand down. They don't believe in the death penalty or torture.

One of the townspeople pops his heads through the door. "Mister Ben!" he says.

At the name, Rey takes a step back, startled.

"I'm closed, Gyphinie," Kylo Ren says. "Forever." He takes his keys and puts them on the counter. "Anyone who wants the store can have it."

The intruder blinks, mouths open, clearly a million questions to ask. Kylo shakes his head. The man leaves.

"Ben?" she asks.

"I thought Kylo might be too obvious," Kylo Ren says. "And Ben is as good a name as any other."

She searches him then, using the Force she has trained so long and so hard to wield like a scalpel. His transformation into…whoever this person is, not Kylo Ren, not Ben Solo, is complete. The Dark Side has fled. She's not quite willing to call him a denizen of the Light. But he is not the same rage-filled monster who tortured her so many years ago.

She scoops up the box with his lightsaber in it. The same one she fought against. The same one that damaged her husband Finn before she and Finn were even a couple.

Kylo Ren waits quietly, as she tries to calm herself down.

"You can do this," he says to her then. "Without anger or rage. Because you know it's the right thing to do."

She stares at him. And wonders why he has more faith in her than she does at this moment.


	3. Chapter 3

The image of the small shop on Tserek faded away. The image of Kylo fitting the shoe was so clear, so real, it felt more like a memory than a fantasy. Like she was remembering something that hadn't happened yet.

She'd been having these false memories from the future — from a different time, a different now, a different then — on and off for a while. But since she'd made a decision about what she was going to do, they'd been coming clearer and more frequently.

Kylo Ren stopped ten meters from where Rey was standing, the peaks of the Yalla Mountains behind him. "A shoemaker?" he yelled at her. "What was that?"

So. Her opponent had seen it too.

Of course he had. They were remembering together.

 _There are other paths_ , the memory said.

There really weren't, she thought.

"I assume the physical labor would be relaxing," she said. "Allow you to meditate in peace, work with your hands, that sort of thing."

"And the idea of that charms you?" Kylo sneered.

She took a step back from him, keeping in her head the layout of the area: the fields, the mountains, the lake, the waterfall.

"I'm not the one who came up with that image," she said.

Or…maybe she had. Maybe they both had, in some odd way. Sometimes, when she was falling asleep after another exhausting day accomplishing little more than hacking off another arm of the First Order hydra, she would think idly about what it would take to bring Kylo Ren back to the light. What it would take to make him turn away from the Dark Side

Ren swung his lightsaber around in the air, creating a figure eight with the afterimage. He was large enough and strong enough to easily wield the weapon with one hand and he made such an imposing figure.

"How did you put that fairy story in my head?" he screamed at her.

"Maybe it's a prophecy," she said, knowing full well that wasn't quite the answer. Not a prophecy, not a fantasy. "Maybe if I let you go now, you'll run away, and you do penance for a number of years in a far-off world —"

He advanced on her quickly then. "After all, you need time to get married to the traitor."

Rey shook her head. She had found that aspect troubling as well. She loved Finn, she did, but as a friend. She had no space in her life for romantic love, for entwining her soul and her emotions with another person. Not until this damned war was over. And even then… It didn't matter. She and Finn were friends. She'd be as like to marry Kylo Ren, frankly — her emotions were far more tied up with him than any other man in the galaxy. Of course, those emotions were rage, fury, anger, pity, disgust instead of love, friendship, and adoration. But the two of them had a strong emotional bond nonetheless.

Interesting that her being married to Finn was a backdrop to whatever that false future memory was. As though whatever constructed the idea had to work backwards to figure out how she would be in that spot, at that moment.

"Why do you keep running?" Kylo Ren said. "There is nowhere for you to go here. We end this now."

"Yes," Rey said, and she steeled herself for the onslaught of Kylo Ren's full power.


	4. Chapter 4

Rey lays on the mat in the midwife's hut, ecstatic just watching her baby sleep. "She's smiling," Rey says.

"Babies don't smile. It's only gas," the midwife tells her.

Rey laughs to herself, quietly. Her baby girl is perfect, with chubby cheeks and a shock of black hair and fists balled tight to her chest like a little fighter. And she is definitely smiling in her sleep.

Palaka the midwife peers down at the newborn. "Well, it's just a thing babies do."

"She's so perfect," Rey says.

"Every baby is," Palaka says softly.

Yes, Rey thinks, but this time it's true.

"Can I hold her?" Palaka's little daughter asks. Sarenna is five and she is already helping her mother with deliveries. Sarenna helped Rey fix this birthing hut when Rey was in the middle of nesting, and she rocks and changes the babies in the midwife's care with a chirpy smile. Sarenna loves babies. She is going to make a fine midwife some day.

But this is the first baby Rey has ever seen, let alone touched. This baby is the first person Rey has ever met that she knows for a fact she is related to. She doesn't even know what she's going to name her daughter. She's had months to find the perfect name and now the baby is here and Rey has no idea what to call her. Right now Rey just wants to look at her daughter and listen to her sleep and watch her yawn.

"Not right now, Sarenna," Rey says.

"Okay," Sarenna says, and she skips off to help her mother clean up the towels and bedding.

Rey is tired and sweaty. She is flying on the pain and endorphins of having given birth to the galaxy's first perfect child. Rey knows that how the baby got here wasn't perfect — she doesn't want to think about that, not right now. What happened happened and it happened months and months ago. But the baby is absolutely perfect with those cheeks and those eyelashes and Rey just wants to watch her sleep.

She sweeps the baby's hair to the side. She shouldn't be so surprised that her daughter was born with a full head of black hair. Palaka says often the hair babies are born with falls off within a few days or weeks, but Rey knows better. She knows her daughter's hair is just going to get thicker and bushier from here on out.

§

Almost a year ago she finished a tour of duty working with youngsters on Reikan. Luke had asked her to do some preliminary work with boys and girls of six and seven who had showed some latent talent with the Force. Simple games that really brought out some of the unusual abilities of the kids, as well as snuck in some math and language skills. The ones who were clearly destined to wrestle with either the dark or the light were sent on to Ahch-To. The others had their talents shaped in other directions.

Six and seven year olds, Force-touched or not, were exhausting. After two straight years of being worn down by their constant questions and the manic energy, Rey had asked for a short off-world holiday, and Luke had said yes. Immediately. With a laugh. And his thanks.

She did not tell him the other reason she wanted to get away.

 _Where are you, scavenger?_ the voice in her head had whispered.

It had sounded like Kylo Ren had been standing right behind her, whispering in her ear.

 _I'm going to find you, girl_ , the voice had said.

She was afraid. She was afraid for herself and she was afraid for the children and so she ran.

She went to a practically deserted planet where some liked to do meditation retreats. There were simple dwellings, where each person could retire in peace from others. Green trees, purple meadows, fresh water, and periodic, silent shipments of food by quiet droids.

The rules of the planet forbade bringing weapons on to its soil. She left her staff and her lightsaber on the ship.

She spent her days meditating in various areas: on the edge of a cliff, in the middle of a meadow, in the shade, in the sunlight, after a hike, in her cabin.

One day, she went to the bank of a small stream and sat on a flat stone, her legs crossed. She faced out toward the water, the light wind blowing through her hair and closed her eyes. She meditated on the nature of what it meant for the Force to be both light and dark, the futility of having these opposing forces always at war with one another.

The moment he entered the sanctuary she knew he was there.

His churning, violent emotions assaulted her like the touch of a gloved hand on the back of her neck.

Shivers went down her back and she opened her eyes.

Rey stood up on her stone and turned around to face him.

Kylo Ren stood on the edge of the forest behind her, all in black, wearing his mask. The first person she'd seen in the weeks since she'd come here had to be him.

And probably the last person she'd ever see. He had the advantage of surprise, he had the will to kill her quickly and without mercy, and he had the odds in his favor. He wasn't wielding his lightsaber — in fact, she couldn't sense it on him — but despite her fighting skills he had the simple advantage of being larger and stronger than she was.

Her bare feet sank into the mud, warm and squishy between her toes.

 _Take off the mask_ , she thought as she walked toward him.

 _Why?_

 _I'd like to look into the eyes of the man who wants to kill me._

Kylo Ren stood there motionless as she walked toward him, his head slightly tilted to one side.

She felt a constriction in her throat. Not his doing — it was hers. Despite the inevitability of this moment, she was nervous. _I don't want to die_ , she thought.

 _None of us do_ , he responded.

His black gloved hands reached up and unlatched the mask. He was such an ordinary-looking bloke underneath the mask. Except for the scar she'd given him down the side of his face, the mark that destroyed any symmetry he had in his long face. She could understand why he wore the mask. It allowed him to be someone else, to do things that maybe he couldn't do as himself.

"The Dark Side seems to need to change its adherents to fit its needs, not theirs," she called out to him. "Also, I prefer your voice without the filter."

One side of his mouth curled up in a rueful smile.

Rey kept walking toward him, and the closer she got to him the calmer she became. There was no reason to fear him — if he'd wanted to kill her, he could have done it already. _Maybe my meditation practice is paying off_ , she thought.

"Calming my thoughts is the hardest part," Kylo Ren answered, looking down at his mask.

"It's the hardest part of what anyone does. It's why so few people do it," she said.

"I don't want to kill you," he said.

"I beg to differ," she said.

Memories from the way he'd entered her mind while torturing her, the fight they'd had in the snow on Starkiller Base, the agony of getting away from him, the fear she'd felt wanting to stay hidden from him.

He blinked, all of those images and sounds and emotions clearly running through his head as well.

She stopped less than two meters away from him, under the shady canopy of the thousand-year-old fifty meter tall trees. The moss-covered ground beneath her feet was cool and dry and the air smelled so sweet. Seemed a shame to bring their issues to this idyllic setting.

"Then why are you here?"

He stared down at her. Rey was tall for a woman but he was so much taller than most humans she'd met in her life. His eyes were dark and sad. His mouth kept moving like he was trying to figure out what to say. He had such a mobile mouth. Made him look younger than she'd expected.

"I thought I wanted to kill you," he said. "I thought I had to. That's what was driving me."

 _Oh, fantastic, more Force-related mysticism_ she thought.

"No," he answered. "A realization I had during one of those meditation sessions."

And with that, before she could even respond, he took one step toward her with those ridiculously long legs of his and he landed on the soft ground in front of her, kneeling, his head bowed. All she could see was his head of thick, wavy black hair, falling forward, shading him from her view. Even kneeling, his head came up to her chest.

"You are the only person in the universe who I can feel," he said. "Who maybe understands how…"

His voice trailed off, but she knew exactly what he meant. Living day to day with the Force running through you was like being in a room filled with bright, startling colors and everyone around you could only see black and white. Or hearing a symphony of the planets and everyone only hears the cicadas chirping near them. It was how she knew which children to send on to Ahch-To: the ones who could feel the caress of the Force's touch against their skin reacted differently than the ones who simply felt the wind blowing against their robes.

Kylo Ren tilted his head back and looked up at her. "I understand if you want to take revenge on me," he said. "I accept that. But I can no more hurt you than I can end my own life."

She was using an immense amount of willpower to keep her hands by her sides and not touch him. She knew exactly what he meant. Despite everything he'd done, despite the harm he'd brought to her and those she'd loved and to the galaxy, she knew she would not be the one to end him. They were more entwined with one another's pasts and futures than anyone else. Neither of them had anyone — in his case, that was by his deliberate action, but she suspected there was more to the story of what had happened to shape Kylo Ren than anyone knew. Being alone either made you strong or it made you crazy. If she had been a child and the only others she ever met with Force sensitivity were Luke with his distractions and fears or Supreme Leader Snoke with his focus and praise, would she have ended up like Kylo Ren?

"That's what you came all this way to say to me?" she asked him.

He dropped his head again. "I don't know what I came for," he said.

The words hung in the quiet air of the forest as the lie they were.

Her hands shook as she reached forward and drew her fingers through his thick hair, drawing him forward against her body. She held him there, feeling him shake as he pressed his head against her ribcage.

As they touched, she realized she could feel his hair and his skull and his breathing and the press of his hands on her body. She could also feel her hands digging into her own body, how comforting it was to rest her head against someone else, the way the black mood lifted simply being near her.

She had never experienced the Force bond like that before. Where the boundaries between them simply fell away and she was inside his world as surely as he was inside hers.

After a moment — yearning comforting touching — he pulled away from her. The confusion on his face mirrored what she was feeling inside. Which only made sense. The sensation of blending together with another person, especially one as strange and different as the two of them were to one another, had shocked her deeply. Why should he be any different?

He rose to his feet and stepped back from her. Staring at her like he had never seen her before.

"I have to go," he said.

"Stop," Rey said to him. "You don't need to go back to the First Order. You don't need to return to any of it."

"I can't stop being me any more than you can stop being you," Kylo Ren said.

"You aren't alone."

The side of his mouth curled again. "You are the only one of your compatriots that feels that way."

It was true. If she took Ren back to the Resistance's headquarters officers might shoot him on sight before General Organa could ever weigh in on the fate of her son.

She took his hand in hers. "You could come back and call yourself Ben Solo. No one would know."

He squeezed her hand. Then dropped it. "He doesn't exist any more."

"We both know that's not true," she said. She had felt every single strand of energy — light, dark, happiness, rage, sadness, loneliness, pain, excitement — that was flowing through Kylo Ren during their embrace. She knew exactly who was in there now. As he knew her.

He turned his back on her and walked back to the area where he'd dropped his mask.

"This doesn't end here," he said.

"This will never stop," she said. "Not until we make it stop."

Her words made him stop in the act of putting the mask on. Instead, he raised his head to stare off toward the sunlight beyond the edge of the forest, toward the burbling stream, his eyes squinting as he looked at something that wasn't there and his mouth made sounds she couldn't hear. Then he looked at her.

"Yes," she said. Or she thought. Both. Neither. It didn't matter.

They each took a step toward the other — his was a lot longer than hers — and then his arms were around her, pulling her up to him, his hand cradling the back of her head. Their lips met and the first romantic kiss Rey ever received was wet and desperate and brutal and the most wonderful feeling in the universe.

She assumed that probably not all kisses were like this, since most people couldn't feel their partner's emotions and sensations as strongly and as starkly as their own. Their kiss deepened and she felt like they were melding into one person, unable to tell who was touching whom and who was feeling what.

He pulled away from her, panting, wanting, needy. She quickly pulled him back down to her, unwilling to lose those sensations, that feeling of belonging. His hands gripped her arms and she held on to him as tightly, her fingers splayed across his back.

"Rey," he whispered.

Her fingers felt for the clasps on his cloak, unhooking it from around his neck. She felt the heavy material slide away from her ( _down his back_ ) and pool around his feet on the forest floor.

He let go of her again, only long enough to pull the folded-over edge of material out. Then he drew her over to him ( _she walked into his arms_ ) and lay the both of them down on the cloak. Within seconds ( _years_ ) he was raised over her and her fingers deftly removed his shirt and he shoved his hands under her tunic to spread across her skin.

Rey did not know if this was the best thing that had ever happened to her or the worst and she didn't much care. She only knew he was here and they were together.

§

Kylo Ren stayed with her for a month. They learned a different sort of meditation, trying to experience one another as themselves, instead of a single unit. She learned what it meant to be a part of the Force.

Luke sent a message to the droids that serviced the individual dwellings and Rey propped the note up on the altar in her room. _Where are you?_ Luke asked. _Come home._

She looked back at Kylo Ren and thought, I am home. Which meant she was lost, didn't it. The only place she could be and the worst place she could stay. There was no good way to respond to Luke, so she didn't.

"What are you going to say to him?" Kylo was leaning back on the bed.

Rey shook her head as she gazed at her lover. Her enemy. What was he now, anyhow? Her other half. His hair even shaggier since he'd arrived on the planet. He looked so soft, practically baby-faced. Well, if babies had three day old stubble. Personal grooming hadn't been much of a priority for either of them in the past few weeks. Mostly they had been lost in the feel of one another's bodies and minds and emotions.

He was the only one she would ever feel this with.

She sat next to him on the bed and as always happened their hands immediately joined. The smooth coolness of his skin, the soft warmth of hers.

"Come with me," she said.

He laughed. "Where? Where could we go?"

"There are millions of planets. We can find one where we can —"

"Where could we go that he won't find me?" Kylo asked simply. Rey wondered if "he" referred to Luke or to Snoke. They each had their own overlords, it seemed. Kylo rubbed his eyes. "Where he won't find us?"

"What can we do?" she whispered.

By way of an answer, he put his arms around her.

Less than a day passed before Rey felt the echo of a scream zap through her head. She ran back to the cabin, where she found Kylo bent over on the ground, the palms of his hands pressing in to the side of his skull as though trying to squeeze the agony out.

Rey didn't feel Snoke's intrusion herself, but she knew Kylo felt it as deeply as anything he'd felt with her over the past month.

When he came out of the blackness, he stared at her. She was losing him, she knew that.

"I have to go," he said.

"You have a choice," she screamed. "You have always had a choice. We have a choice."

He still had the uniform. Where had he been keeping it all this time? It was black and pristine and unmarred by dust or stains or the floor of the forest where she'd last seen him in it.

"Come with me," he said, holding his hand out.

His hand. Back in the black leather glove.

"Choose me over him," Rey begged. "Please."

"Together we are stronger than he is," Kylo said. "Come with me and we can break this together."

"Or I will lose you and then myself."

He walked out of her cabin and Rey saw his ship had come to get him on the landing pad.

His mask was in his hand.

He did not turn around as he walked up the ramp.

A day after he left she woke up from a fitful sleep, put her hand over the soft skin below her belly button, and realized she would be tied to him forever. She restarted her meditation practice, concentrating on one thing: keeping Kylo blocked from her thoughts.

She had gone to see Luke and told him she was done with the order. He knew immediately why, of course, and wished her luck in the future.

"Can I give you some advice?" he said mildly. "This won't change who he is truly is. It might…make him worse."

§

Whatever the wisdom of those days she'd spent with Kylo Ren — and Rey did not lie to herself, he was only Kylo Ren, not Ben Solo — she looks at her perfect baby girl and decides it is all worthwhile.

She is so lost in the wonder at the miracle that somehow two humans can somehow make a third that she doesn't immediately register the wave of darkness, rage, and determination that rolls over her. When she does feel it, it's mixed in with her own growing terror. She struggles to sit up, ignoring the pain that causes her, and she picks up the baby, wrapped in her soft blanket, and thinks about where she can go.

She had kept Kylo Ren out of her thoughts. But of course he would feel his daughter's first breaths.

Two rooms away Sarenna screams and Rey feels Palaka's life threads neatly severed in two by a slender, elegant bolt of pure rage, wielded by its creator. Rey knows Sarenna is next.

"No!" she screams. "Please! Please don't hurt her!"

The sound of Rey's voice wakes the baby up. The tiny infant screws her face out and bellows a sound of unhappiness.

The red glow of his lightsaber fills the doorway before he does. The blackness of his mask and his uniform and cape cast a pall over the room. The midwife's villa is filling with stormtroopers, but the only weapon that has been used is Kylo Ren's.

For a moment Rey is sure he is going to cut her down like he just did Palaka. He will slice her and the baby in two.

Then, in a blink, the red beam retracts.

Rey holds the screaming infant in her arms as she backs away from him.

"How could you do this?" he yells at her, his voice altered by the filter in the mask. If there were anything familiar or caring in that voice, the mask has erased it.

Despite the barriers she has erected to the bond they share, she can feel the rage and fear that are coursing through him. At discovering the baby's existence. How betrayed he feels. How frightened he is about what his next course of action is.

He will take the baby to Snoke.

What he does after that…Kylo Ren isn't even sure yet. Raise his daughter as the most powerful user of the Dark Side of the Force ever? Or slay Snoke when the Supreme Leader is distracted by the monumental opportunity this child of two Force users represents?

But one thing is for absolute certain: Kylo Ren is taking the baby with him.

"You can't," Rey says. "Please. Please don't take her from me."

Family isn't exactly Kylo Ren's strong suit. He has no understanding of what the baby represents to Rey. To him she is merely a means to an end.

Rey knows that was not true all those months ago. For a brief shining moment they were together and it was not like this.

"You may come with me," Kylo Ren says. "Or you can die where you cower. Hand over the child."

The large black gloves reach for the baby, who is howling. Rey, whose body is still racked with pain from the delivery, is shaking. She can't stand up straight.

Kylo Ren takes her daughter from her hands and cradles her in his arms. The baby is still screaming.

"Please don't hurt her. Please," Rey begs him.

"I have no intention of hurting my child," he says, subtly emphasizing the last words. "She is the most important person in the galaxy." He moves the baby into a hold by one arm. And with the other he lights his lightsaber, the electronic hiss filling the room more powerfully than the child's wails. "You will come with me. Or you will die."

Rey stares at the man standing behind the red beam, a man who meant almost everything to her for a short while, the one who will destroy her no matter what she does in this moment. If she goes with him, it's almost certain she will go to the Dark Side — she will have to, to protect her daughter. And if she manages to stave that off, he will kill her for not submitting.

"All right," she says.


	5. Chapter 5

**Note:** In case it's not obvious (has to do with the structure of this one), I'm uploading these segments in pairs. So if you've been following this story, flip back a chapter to see if you've seen the last one first.

Kylo Ren's lightsaber ignited and Rey parried his initial slash at her.

"Tell me, girl," he said, "why are you doing this? Hoping to distract me from your inevitable defeat."

She swept his weapon at his feet and he leapt out of the way, delivering a downward strike as he moved. She rolled out of his way.

"I'm not doing this!" she yelled at him. He seemed caught up in the idea that she was having these ideas. "Why would I do that?"

"Some of those images were kind of…thrilling," he said, and his voice sounded horrifying. As it was meant to. He was deliberately goading her.

She had never hated someone as much as she hated him at the moment. Reminding of the images and feelings that had just flashed through her head. The terror at being found…the feeling of being held. His mouth on hers. The melding of minds and bodies and emotions was amazing. Taking the baby from her arms made her want to cry even now.

But it was all wrong. The images were in her head, but the feelings were all wrong. Everything that was happening to her was really happening to someone else.

She couldn't let hate ride her. Hate messed with her emotions and her concentration and what they were doing. She had to know what was happening.

He stalked down from his perch toward where she was crouched. She sprang up and their lightsabers crashed. She held on to the pommel of her sword, holding his blade down, until he brought his up in a stronger motion, forcing her backward. She sliced at him again, then ran up on some rocks. She couldn't fight him from here, but she could talk to him.

"Take the mask off," Rey said. "I know what you look like, remember?"

"I've learned you seem to think a lot about me," he said.

"Yes, yes, I'm your closest friend in the galaxy," she told him. "Take the mask off."

The last Knight of Ren looked up at her with those large, empty red eyes, and then he dropped his lightsaber by his side. He reached up to his mask and removed it, the seal breaking with a hiss. For a moment she saw him with the Other Rey's eyes, the one who'd loved him on some unknown world and had her heart broken when he took her child away.

But she wasn't feeling that. Someone else was, and they'd left their memories in her head like a thief dropping clues in the night.

"What do you see?" she asked.

"A scavenger," he sneered.

"No, you fool. What do you see when the images come? Are they all things you're doing?"

"I'm seeing lies," he spat. "I would never kneel to you."

No, of course he wouldn't. _This_ Kylo Ren wouldn't. But maybe…some version of him would have.

The plan she had had before she came to Kirien's Planet was creating a major disturbance in the Force. One so large that what was real and true here.

"Listen to me," she said.

"I don't listen to fools and to liars," he said, and he followed her on to the rocks.


	6. Chapter 6

Ben Solo is an utter dork when he is excited and giddy about something. Rey has never seen him _this_ dorky, but before a week ago she didn't even know he even had a dorky side. Probably no one on any planet has seen him be this dorky. It is a good thing she finds this aspect of his personality adorable, given that she is planning on spending the rest of her life with him.

She's not too thrilled by what's made him so crazy though. The imminent arrival of his parents.

A week ago Ben was forbidding and usually silent and one of the most demanding people she had ever met.

This week, however, things are different. This week she is totally in love with him. They're going to get married.

He is nervous and excited, walking around the hotel suite on Coruscant. His long arms flap out like a gawky bird's wings as he paces around the living room of the suite, wondering if everything is perfect for when his parents arrive.

Rey had not really realized until she'd walked into the suite Ben had rented exactly how wealthy her fiancé was. At the Academy he lived like all of the other instructors: a small room, an even smaller wardrobe. She'd heard rumors that he came from money, but she had always assumed that it was just a rumor: when you grew up as poor as she did, those with money stood across a grand chasm from those who did not. Even the worst of the rich she had seen on Jakku had had a certain…gravitas.

Ben, his hair going out in all directions and his clothes ill-fitting, has exactly _zero_ gravitas.

She loves every single flailing swing of his arms.

The room alert buzzes. "They're on their way up!" Ben is ridiculously excited. "They're going to love you. They're probably going to wonder why you're bothering with me." He pats down the sides of his shirt, which were billowing out at strange angles. "Oh no. What if they ask you flat out why you're marrying me?"

Rey laughs. He always talks about her like that, as though she were some kind of goddess who was stooping to dally with him, instead of a scholarship student at the Academy who'd shown up in the first day and embarrassed herself by eating so much at her first meal because she'd never seen that much food in one place.

§

At the Academy, Ben was the strange, standoffish teacher, the most sought after instructor at the Academy, the one the students could only hope to watch in action, let alone take a class from.

The first time Rey had entered the dueling ring with him, he'd handed her ass to her in about fifteen seconds. Given that meant she lasted about thirteen seconds longer than the average student, the student body was impressed. After Ben actually said out loud, "Not bad," Rey didn't have to buy her own drinks for a week.

Six months later he accepted Rey into his tutorial group, which meant less sleep and more work and crying herself into unconsciousness most nights. But she and the other cadets learned so much from him. It was amazing. Months of intense study with him and they never had a conversation that was anything other than him questioning and probing her understanding of the material.

And then there was the day he spoke to her outside of the ring, outside of the classroom. One of the rare days when the students were allowed to recuperate from their training, do their own reading, even sleep an extra twenty minutes.

Rey decided to do her laundry.

Ben walked in with his own tub of clothes. Teachers did their own chores? she thought, but of course Master Luke would insist that teachers do their own.

"Hi," he said. She had never heard him say something so…normal. Friendly, even. In fact, she realized with a start, not only had she never had a conversation with him outside the classroom, she'd never heard him speak with anyone outside of class. "Mind if I..."

His voice wobbled, she noticed. She shrugged. "Nobody else is using it."

She watched him get started trying to fit the spinner to the tub and then get the water in. He was…well, he was hopeless. Ben, who was so graceful and fluid with the swords and the knives and shaping the world with the Force, could not operate the manual washtub.

"So you don't know how to do everything," she teased him as she showed him.

"Please don't tell the others," he said, and he smiled. She realized she had never seen him smile. He looked so much younger. Nicer. More like…a person.

 _More like a guy, you mean_ , she thought.

She got his tub set up and he started it working. Then he had a choice of the chair next to her or the one across the room.

"The light's better over here," she said, and he took the chair next to her.

"Is Rey your first name or your last?" Ben asked.

"It's just Rey. I don't remember my family's name."

"Wow. No family name. Wonder what that must be like. I used to dream about changing mine."

Why would anyone change a name like Ben Solo, she wondered. He had to be at least distantly related to the Solo family and everybody knew who they were.

She blurted out, "Is it true you're related to Master Luke?"

He glanced at her, in surprise, and then he burst out laughing. "Is that the rumor? Like, the only way I could get this job is through family?"

She started to protest, to tell him that it was just something another student had mentioned in passing, when Ben waved her concern off. "It's okay. Not only am I related to him, he's my uncle."

If Luke Skywalker was his uncle, then Ben was more than just tangentially related to the Skywalker-Organa-Solo family, he was…

"Oh," she said.

Ben was staring at her. Waiting for her reaction to his news, maybe?

"Well, that's why it's just rumors," she said. "No one could possibly claim you got this job through nepotism. You're amazing. You're the best teacher here."

Her words hung in the air. She was mildly embarrassed at how she was gushing over him, but it wasn't like she ever had a chance to give him feedback in class. Usually by the end of class she could barely move.

They stared at one another for a second. Or maybe it was several centuries.

Ben stood up and suddenly Rey realized that the tall, slender man who could keep them working for ten hours straight was not always so fluid and graceful. In fact, he suddenly seemed downright awkward in his movements.

"Thank you," he said. "You're, um, very kind."

"Ben," she said, and he turned to look at her. For someone who always seemed so focused and determined, he suddenly seemed young and inexperienced. "I'm not being kind. I'm being truthful. I'll tell you the truth. You're the reason I've stayed here."

Only…she doesn't say that. She _thinks_ it.

And from the way he blinks at her, she knows he's heard every word. Or every…feeling.

 _Thank you_ , he thinks.

She smiles. _This is amazing. I have never felt anything like this._

 _Neither have I._

He stood in the doorway, keeping his distance from her, and he looked out across the carefully tended gardens toward the center of the Academy.

"Hey, look at that. I think the tea house is open," he said.

"I have another pile of shirts I need to get started, but if you can wait that long, I'll go with you," she said.

Ben stared at her and then he turned. And proceeded to walk straight into the door jamb.

"I meant to do that," he said, wearing that goofy lopsided smile, obviously embarrassed, staring at her. Rey realized she was probably in love with him and always had been. "Wait here," he said.

He left the laundry shack and walked across the island to find Master Luke's meditation hut, the only structure on the northward facing side. He apologized for interrupting Luke's meditation, resigned his position, and asked for the Master's blessing. Then he asked for his uncle's blessing. Then he asked his uncle not to say anything to his parents until he had a chance to. Luke sighed and nodded.

Then Ben walked back to the laundry hut, told Rey he'd resigned, and asked her if instead of getting tea with him, would she marry him.

She said yes. Seemed obvious she was going to spend eternity with him. Why waste time?

§

And now, less than a week later, Rey is meeting Ben's parents.

The door to the suite entered and Ben's parents walks in. His mother is so petite and yet dominates the room with her presence, which isn't surprising given that she's royalty by birth and a general by right. And Ben's father is much taller than his wife, though not as tall as his son, and he has that twinkle in his eye that Rey knows means he was a lot of trouble when he was younger. And probably still is.

Rey squeezes Ben's hand. He intertwines his fingers with hers.

After initial introductions and a small lunch Leia and Han ask Rey to tell them a little bit about herself. She has a hard time getting started — how was she going to tell a princess-general and her husband the outlaw (and also a general, if she wasn't mistaken) about her hardscrabble upbringing on an outlying world like Jakku? But she starts, hesitantly, telling them about being a scavenger and participating in some of the local competitions for swordfighting and finally getting noticed by a local commander who recommended her for a full scholarship to the nearest school, on Gemtoo. Within a month there the headmaster contacted Luke Skywalker and sent her on her way to Ahch-To, home of Luke's academy.

"All on your own," Leia says. "Without the backing of a local council or a noble family or…"

Rey shakes her head.

Han sits back on his chair, impressed. Then he points at his son.

"Ben, she can do better than you. Pray she never figures that out."

"Dad!" Ben says.

"Don't worry, my dear," Leia says to her. "It's tradition for the men in this family to marry above their station."

"You're so lucky to be an orphan," Ben says.

Rey looks at him and smiles. "I'm not, any more," she says.

Ben leans down and kisses her. His mother chatters on about the arrangements for the wedding — a small celebration by Organa family standards — until the details of what she was saying filtered through their romantic haze.

"Two months?" Rey says, startled.

"Oh, at least," Leia says. "That's if we absolutely rush everything. Better give it six."

"I was hoping we could get married in the next day or two," Ben says.

"Should have done what we did and get married by the first Qio-dan priest you could find," Han says. "Not waiting for the wedding night, are you, kid? Leia, you ever had that talk with him about —"

Leia rolls her eyes. "Honey, Luke will be here as soon as he can get away from that school of his. I understand he just lost his best instructor." She winks at Rey. "He wouldn't miss his little nephew getting married for the world."

"Little?" Han says. "He's a foot taller than I am now."

Leia bats her husband on the arm. "Shoo, fly." She leans across the table and takes Ben's and Rey's hands in her own. "Family is everything."

Rey recognizes the feeling of rage that is building in the pit of her stomach. The same feeling she felt when she watched another kid get beaten up by the junk traders. When one student took the credit for another student's work.

She's feeling it now, seeing Ben's parents unable to be supportive of him.

Rey can't stand it any more.

"Then why are you making this all about you?" she says.

Leia drops her hand and sits back. Han blinks in surprise.

"Just a second, young lady," Han says.

Leia leans in front of her husband, which neatly cuts him off. Her smile is condescending and political. "Honey," she begins, "there are a lot of aspects to this that you don't understand right now."

"All I need to understand is that you don't give a damn about him and what he wants. All of this is about you."

Ben has his large hand splayed on her back, both as comfort and as a warning. "Sweetheart," he whispers. Somewhere in the back of her head, Rey recognizes his tone from when he was her distant, forbidding teacher at the Academy. When he was warning her away from a particularly dangerous maneuver.

Rey looks at him, and he looks miserable. No, he looks resigned. This is just what he expects from his parents. No matter he went off to be an instructor at Luke's Academy on the other side of the galaxy.

She didn't listen to his warnings much then, either.

She took his hand. _Do you want to wait six months? You know she's going to stretch this to a year. Do you want to wait until every diplomat your mother has ever met can schedule a landing at the space port?_

His reaction was immediate: _No._

"My son is an Organa," Leia says to Rey, very slowly, as though she's a child."

"I thought his last name was Solo," Han says. "Something you want to tell me?"

"And as such he comes from an important family, that has responsibilities."

 _My parents married because she was pregnant_ , Ben thinks. _They think I don't know that._

Rey begins to giggle and she tunes Leia's voice out. Instead, she looks at Ben. _You said you used to think about changing your name. You ever come up with one you want to use?_

 _Yes_ , he replies.

 _I'm game if you are._

 _New name, new responsibilities._

She squeezes his hand. _New family._

Within an hour Ben and Rey shoo Leia and Han out the door, assuring Ben's mother that they'll go along with any plans she comes up with for the wedding. At two hours they are completely packed, after three they are at a little shop to the left of the spaceport where a squishy yellow guy with big spectacles hands over new ident cards. The squishy yellow guy is happy enough to put one over on that damn smuggler who got so high and mighty, so Rey is pretty sure Leia and Han will not be able to trace these cards.

At three hours, they are on their way off Coruscant. They are going…somewhere else.

"Now what do we do?" Ben asks.

Wait, no. She has to remember to call him _Kylo_ now. "I think we'll be okay," Rey says.

He smiles.


	7. Chapter 7

Note: as always, I post these two chapters at a time, so you might want to flip back a page and read that one first.

The momentary glance she'd given the path was all she had as a mental guide up the boulders. She was moving backward over the rocky terrain, as fast as she could, and Kylo Ren was advancing on her.

As the image or memory or universe where she was his student and they ran off together faded from her own mind, she saw Kylo Ren try to get his own balance back. He cleared his throat and turned on his lightsaber again.

"I'm disappointed. For such a clever girl, you have remarkably cloying fantasies."

Rey felt the corners of her mouth turn up. "That one wasn't mine either, Ren," she sneered. "Are you certain that wasn't more your kind of thing? Seeing your parents back together?"

Silently she berated herself for playing his stupid game of irritation, annoyance, and anger. They didn't have time for this.

"Listen to me, girl —"

"Oh, stop it!" she yelled at him. "You must feel what's going on here. Why we're here. What's happening."

For Ray, the effects of Kirien's Planet were obvious. And if they were obvious to her, they had to be blazing and all-encompassing to the man coming after her, lightsaber in hand, determined to end her.

There were places in the galaxy where the concentration of the Force was all-consuming. Where the power of the Force, light or dark, were so strong they changed everything around them. Luke had told her of one such place, Dagobah, where he had trained with Master Yoda, where he had first seen the Force ghosts, where who he was and his understanding of reality itself changed.

The third moon of Kirien's Planet, the one with the temperate zones filled with holiday makers, was another.

Millions of visitors had come, ostensibly to enjoy a holiday in a pretty place, not understanding the power of the very rocks under their feet, not willing to stay too long because they couldn't understand the energies flowing through them. When Rey had set foot on the surface, she had felt the weavings of the Force all around her like a spray of warm summer rain. To someone as Force-trained as Ren, it had to feel like a boiling cauldron and his head was being shoved beneath the surface.

"I know you've learned some kind of mind trick, scavenger," Kylo Ren said.

"Come on! Do you honestly think in the time since I began training I could learn to do this? Do you think you could do this? It's not me. _It's this place_."

And Kylo Ren…stopped climbing.

Rey let her words hang in silence, let them sink into her opponent. She allowed herself to check the Force bond they had, to get a sense of what he was feeling. When Luke had explained that she and Ren had bonded, she had worried: would he be able to read her mind, get information from her? Would she be able to know what he was thinking, see the terrible things he was doing from his point of view?

Turned out she needn't have worried. Mostly their Force bond consisted of a general empathic response. She had a vague sense of what he was feeling. Sometimes.

What he was feeling right now was unease that maybe whatever she was about to say was right. Because he had felt there was something not quite right in this place either.

"Stop trying to kill me for ten seconds and think. Why are you and I here, now? Did the First Order have any plans to come here? I'll tell you a secret: the Resistance wasn't planning on coming here either. We were headed back to D'Qar." She used her lightsaber as an indicator, sweeping around in an arc, indicating the field of dead bodies. "And yet. See what's happened."

The warm breeze blew thick strands of Kylo Ren's black hair in front of his face as he turned to look at the battlefield. Then he looked up at her, his suspicious eyes narrowed at her. "What's your explanation?"

"Same one as why we're having these…visions."

Except _visions_ wasn't the right word. _Alternate lifetimes_ was somewhat closer to the mark. She had felt the Force streaming around her when she had walked on to the moon. The moment Kylo Ren had arrived, she had felt it with every molecule in her body, mostly because she had felt lifetimes move through her. Except none of them were hers.

"The Force flows much more strongly here. It wants us both here. The question is why."

Kylo Ren flexed the gloved fingers of his right hand and curved them inward. In the distance, his ship the Finalizer rose off of its landing spot and turned in the air, like it was being observed by an invisible giant. Ren spread his fingers out and the ship dropped to the ground, rocking slightly.

"Could you do that before?" Rey asked.

"Yes," Kylo Ren responded.

"Could you do it that easily?" she asked.

After a moment, he shook his head. Then he looked at her. Easily the most surprising thing about Kylo Ren was how completely human he was under his uniform. He wore it to be someone else, someone he wasn't. These _alternate lifetimes_ were giving her a sense of how he had ended up where he was now, despite seemingly having everything she hadn't.

"You're scared of what this means," he said.

"I guess our Force bond must not be as strong as Luke told me it was," Rey said.

He raised his eyebrows, waiting.

"I'm terrified of what it means," she said.

"One of us kills the other. Same as it ever was."

She turned off her lightsaber and stood there. Unguarded. She could defend herself if he rushed her right then, but not well, and he'd cut her pretty badly.

She knew he wouldn't.

"If one of us kills the other in this place…what's going to happen then, Kylo?"

He nodded. And turned off his lightsaber.


End file.
